That's probably because a good VB6 programmer would still be a terrible C++ programmer. There are too many ideas VB programmers will never encounter. In order to be a good C++ programmer you'd be a VB god (rolling out your own DLLs and OCXs).

I have done more than my fair share of VB programming from version 2 when it was new up until 98 or so. I even got my MCP certification on VB3... It was the quickest tool to build a Windows application at the time.

In fact, at least here in Brazil, the rise of Windows as a corporate OS coincides with a rapid adoption of VB for in-company development and the fall of Clipper under DOS. I saw it first hand because it happened while I was helping write a huge console-based app in Dataflex. The app is still used by more than a hundred municipalities in Brazil and I learned the master thesis of a colleague was about automatically porting it to something more modern (the project more or less failed).